e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

SAN health check

Over the last few days, we have been running an interesting tool in conjunction with Brocade, the guys that make SAN switches.

As a major Brocade customer (we have about 60 switches and multiple fabrics), they offered to do traffic analysis and diagnostic runs for us and compare the results against a set of "best practices". In effect, a SAN health check.

I have the largest SAN fabric in the corporation, configured as 6 edge switches on a single core switch. Of course, it's a dual fabric, so all up, I have 14 switches (shortly to be 16 as I add two more core switches to make them fully redundant core edge fabrics).

The program that Brocade supplies telnets to each individual switch and runs diagnostic commands. It then starts sampling port performance on an interval you set. Once the statistics are collected, you send them off to Brocade, who produces nice graphics and reports for you.

A survey is also conducted to determine that the performance and redundancy characteristics you expect are being met by the fabrics.

This is a great tool, and I encourage other major Brocade customers to ask their sales reps about it.